Carl Dahlström and Victor Lapuente, Organizing Leviathan: Politicians, Bureaucrats, and the Making of Good Government (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 262 pp. $29.99 (paperback), ISBN 9781316630655

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13022
• Author: James L. Perry
• Date: 01 January 2019
• Published date: 01 January 2019

144 Public Administration Review • Januar y | Fe brua ry 201 9

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 79, Iss. 1, pp. 144–146. © 2019 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13022

James L. Perry is Distinguished

Professor Emeritus in the School of Public

and Environmental Affairs at Indiana

University, Bloomington. He was Editor

in Chief of

Public Administration Review

from 2012 to 2017. He is a Fellow of the

National Academy of Public Administration

and recipient of several awards for career

contributions in public administration and

public management.

E-mail: perry@indiana.edu

Carl Dahlström and Victor Lapuente, Organizing Leviathan:

Politicians, Bureaucrats, and the Making of Good

Government (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,

2017). 262 pp. $29.99 (paperback), ISBN 9781316630655

The main purpose of this book is to investigate

rigorously the underpinnings for the quality

of government. Its thesis is relatively simple:

relations between politicians and bureaucrats matter

and they matter on a variety of fronts, ranging from

corruption, to government effectiveness, to capacity

for government reform.

Dahlström and Lapuente make a compelling case to

illuminate a set of issues that gnawed at me when I

was Public Administration Review (PAR) Editor in

Chief. I expressed concern about levels of corruption

in the United States, the robust scholarship about

corruption outside public administration, and

the lack of attention within the modern public

administration literature to the corruption

phenomenon (Perry 2015). This book helps give my

inchoate concerns some structure and points to a

path forward for making corruption research—and,

more broadly, research on government quality—

central to the scholar–practitioner dialogue in public

administration.

The authors present their complex and

multidimensional case carefully and intentionally.

Chapter 1, Why Relations Between Politicians and

Bureaucrats Matter, is the shortest chapter in the

book, largely introductory, telling readers what

the book is about and how it will unfold. During

the course of the introduction, the authors lay out

some important definitional information and hint

at the case they develop throughout the book. The

authors get to the heart of their enterprise in the

opening paragraphs of the book. In the first two

sentences they write: “This book deals with quality of

government. In our view, governments of high quality

act impartially, are non-corrupt, and use resources

efficiently” (1). Thus, from the outset, we know the

book is about quality of government, defined in

terms of efficiency, noncorruption, and impartiality.

As an objective, quality of government is not only

distinct from the sometimes amorphous and often

micro “performance” construct about which we have

heard so much in recent years (Andersen, Boesen, and

Pedersen 2016), but it is clearly identified.

In Chapter 2, Theory, the authors set out the case

for the core processes that sustain good government.

Dahlström and Lapuente write:

The main idea in this book is that if the

organization of the state apparatus, or

the Leviathan in the book’s title, divides

public officials into two distinct groups, the

possibilities for abuse and opportunism by

public officials are diminished because these

two groups have different career incentives. (13)

The authors go on to argue that the separation of

political and bureaucratic careers puts the two groups

into positions to respond to different regimens of

accountability that are characterized by different

incentives. The distinct incentive systems make

politicians accountable to electors and bureaucrats

accountable to professional peers. What is more,

the distinct incentives stimulate mutual monitoring

between the groups and capabilities for bureaucrats to

speak truth to power.

In building a case for their theory, Dahlström and

Lapuente begin by testing the validity of an alternative

theory because of its prominence and longevity in

the social sciences. Chapter 3, A Closed Weberian

Bureaucracy, looks at whether guaranteeing lifelong

careers and specific legal protections to bureaucrats,

essentially formal regulations, is the key to curbing

corruption. The authors designate the bureaucratic

rules theory for the control of corruption “a closed

Weberian bureaucracy” because of its origins in

Weber’s bureaucratic theory. Interestingly, although

many scholars and practitioners are inclined to affirm

the theory, Dahlström and Lapuente show that it falls

short of predicting control of corruption.

Dahlström and Lapuente embark in Chapter 4,

Corruption, to show that the theoretical argument

Reviewed by: James L. Perry

Indiana University, Bloomington